Age of Ash, page 6
Sammish stood, and Alys started, noticing her for the first time. The fear in her expression was like Sammish had snuck up on a cat without being heard and tugged its tail. For a moment, she was certain Alys would race for the street and be gone. Sammish stood very still, met her friend’s gaze, and nodded slowly.
She could see Alys weighing something in her mind, but she had no idea what it was. Alys moved forward with twitch-fast, uncertain steps, crowding close to her. Her eyes looked wild in the soft light.
“What are you doing here?” Alys said, her voice brittle and sharp.
“Looking for you.”
“Why? Who wants me found?”
“I’m not hired. I just… You were gone, and I didn’t know where.”
“You’re not being paid to hunt me down?”
There were hundreds of things Sammish had half imagined Alys might say, but this was none of them. “I wouldn’t take that job if someone offered. We’re friends.”
Alys seemed to turn in on herself, like she was listening to voices only she could hear. Sammish chanced a step toward her, and Alys didn’t shy.
“You can help me,” she said. “I’ll go to… I’ll go to the square where Nimal’s crew spends their days?”
“The dry cistern,” Sammish said with a nod.
“You follow behind and watch. See if anyone comes after me. If you see someone, shout to me, yeah?”
“Are you in trouble?”
Alys shook her head, but she didn’t mean No. “Let’s find out.”
In the street, the moon was little more than a sliver of white, the stars a scattering of brightness between the close-set eaves. What light there was came from the candle glow of windows. Alys was a shadow among shadows, and Sammish followed her by the sound of footsteps as much as by the glimpses she wrung out of the darkness. As they walked, she listened for anything else. Longhill at night was more nearly silent than in the day, but still Sammish heard voices. Two men shouting over each other about something. Someone else crying. Unnervingly close by, a single deep laugh that wasn’t repeated. Running footsteps from the east that ended with the clatter of a closing door. Sammish followed and watched, imagining what she would do if she did see someone falling in behind Alys. She wished that she had a knife. Before her, Alys slipped in and out of sight.
When they arrived at the square, it was empty. In daylight, it was hardly more than a wider space in the street with a cistern that had cracked four years earlier, spilling water into the street and through people’s homes on its muddy way to the river, and still hadn’t been repaired. Now the place felt like something from a song—a space between worlds where the familiar and the eerie mixed and became each other. Alys sat on the edge of the dry cistern, her hands at her sides. From the way she held herself, Sammish guessed they were in fists. Alys tensed as Sammish walked toward her, and then relaxed a little when she recognized that it was only the girl she’d expected. Sammish sat beside her on the crumbling stone. The grit muttered against her thigh.
Sammish’s eyes had adapted to the night, and in the weak glimmer of moon and stars, she could make out some of Alys’s features. The tightness of her mouth, the wildness of her eyes. She was so clearly in the grip of fear that Sammish half expected some overlooked threat to lurch out of the shadows at them. She felt her own throat tighten.
“Anyone?” Alys asked.
Sammish shook her head, then saw that Alys wasn’t looking at her. “No. No one followed you. Just me.”
“Good,” Alys said sharply. And then, more softly, “That’s very, very good.”
“What is going on? Where have you been? Is this to do with Darro?”
Alys took a long, shuddering breath made louder by the dark. When she leaned forward, it was as sudden as if she’d been punched.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but Darro was in something. A pull of his own, maybe. It was big.”
“Is it why he was killed?”
“I don’t know,” Alys said, her voice breaking on the final word. “I don’t know why it happened or who did it. I found things after he was gone, and I know there was something big happening. It might have been them. Or it could have been the bluecloak. The one from our pull. The one at the coronation. You remember?”
“Of course I do.”
“Or he was looking for Orrel and something happened. It might not have been his work at all. It might have been me. I can’t tell. I don’t know if I killed him. Maybe I killed him.”
Alys’s voice rose with each phrase like a plucked string being pulled tighter.
“I’ve been moving from place to place, watching to see if anyone followed. I thought of going back to Aunt Thorn, but what if she was part of his pull or whatever it was, because who else could it be with coin like that? I couldn’t even be in Longhill where everyone knows me and I know everyone, or it feels like that, and then I wasn’t going to come tonight, but…” She lifted the ashes and began to cry in earnest.
Sammish, heart aching, went to put an arm around her shoulders, but Alys flinched. Sammish made do with an awkward pat on her shoulder blade.
She couldn’t make much sense of the words spilling out in the darkness. The details, whatever they were, would have to wait. What she could take as certain was that Alys had been frightened and alone for long enough that she was drunk on it. She’d spent too long with only her fear and her grief, and it was throwing her mind off. Alys was the sure one, solid and comfortable with her own judgment. The bawling girl in the dark beside her was an aspect that Sammish had never seen before. The older girl’s vulnerability pulled at Sammish like a sudden rush in the river. She found herself weeping a little too, not even knowing what they were upset about. Only that Alys was broken by it, and so she was too.
Alys’s sobs slowed a little. The shadow of her bowed head went still. The soft, saltwater smell of tears came to Sammish like the subtlest perfume, and she sighed. The slap of boots against cobblestone came from off to their left, but Alys didn’t stiffen, and the footsteps passed and faded away. Some other poor bastard making their way through the dark on an errand that didn’t touch them. Sammish sighed deeply and gathered herself.
“All right,” she said. “Do you need money?”
Alys’s one bitter laugh could have meant she needed it badly or that she didn’t need it at all. Sammish didn’t press that issue. Not yet, anyway.
“Whatever it is you need, we’ll find a way to get it,” Sammish said, making her voice sound more certain than she was. She didn’t know if she was being strong for Alys or as a way to convince herself that what she said made sense. “We’re clever, and it won’t be hard. Then once you’re not spinning around like a feather in a windstorm, we’ll take care of the rest.”
Alys was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was still thick and raw. “You don’t have to do that.”
“We’ll take care of the rest,” Sammish said again, neither more forcefully nor less. “But first, if you can, tell me what we’re looking at. All of it. From go.”
Andomaka Chaalat, whom Darro had known as the pale woman, slept, and in her sleep she dreamed. She was very well practiced at dreaming.
In her dream it was winter, the great river in the heart of the city a single sheet of grey ice stretching north into the wilds and south toward the distant sea. She knew it was bitingly cold though she didn’t feel it. Just north of her, a hole in the ice wide enough to fall through framed black, fast-flowing water. She watched threads of water weaving over one another, the turbulence shifting like the river itself was alive and restless. Something struck the ice she stood on from below like it was aiming for her feet, and she understood that Prince Ausai was in the water. That he was trapped there, swimming against the stream but unable to reach back to the catastrophe where the ice had collapsed beneath him.
Panic lit her, and she turned south, looking for some other flaw in the ice. Or for some instrument to make one. Around her on both sides of the river, the stones and buildings of Kithamar shuddered and cracked, and she knew with the logic of dream that they were being replaced. New buildings that, while they looked just the same, were not. Impostors made from architecture. The city itself was being eaten from within, and something alien, new, and malefic was taking its place.
The thump of punches from under the ice grew louder, and she sprinted, trying to find exactly where they were loudest, where Ausai was summoning her. And then her perspective shifted, and she was the one underwater. The Khahon carried her along under the gently glowing ice, and she saw no escape. She would be carried down to the sea that was also death and be lost in it.
She woke herself trying to scream.
She was in her room. Thin, milky moonlight pressed through the window like the glow of the ice she had just left. She pulled herself up from her bed and walked across the rugs, wood creaking under her with every step. Her private rooms looked out toward the east, the still-coming dawn, and the palace where her cousin Byrn a Sal slept in the prince’s chambers.
Her cousin who was not what he seemed.
She felt the urge to go down to the private temple, as if anything there would have changed. She resisted. The servant girl who slept in the pallet at the end of Andomaka’s bed muttered, stirred, and sat up.
“Lady Chaalat? Are you all right?”
“I had a dream,” she said.
“Should I get your books, lady? Or wake Master Tregarro?”
“I don’t need them. I know what this dream meant,” Andomaka said. “It wasn’t subtle.”
Each year, a day came that marked the end of summer.
The city rose as it had for months, but instead of thick, heavy, unforgiving heat, there was a crispness to the morning air. Before midday came, the city would be bathed in its own sweat again, the taxmen at the gates would be fanning themselves as they had before and would again, and the dogs would curl in the shadows and pant. Children would swim in the canals and be chased out by mothers afraid that their babies would drown. The following morning might have the same chill, or it might not. There would be more warm days to come, but they would be warm autumn days. Summer had surrendered its crown, and the slow, lush, sensual slide into harvest had begun.
This was the first one in Alys’s life that Darro wouldn’t share. And after it, the first Longest Night without him. The first thaw he wouldn’t see.
Since the night she’d found the knife and the coins, Alys had kept moving, spending her nights streetbound near the Temple or buying a place on a barge tied up on the Riverport docks. Most recently, she’d found a room set deep into the flesh of Palace Hill in the quarter they called Oldgate: a vast fortification that rose up the eastern cliff face from the river to the palace. She leaned against the retaining wall that held the switchback road from crumbling down to the water, and looked out to the east and the rising sun. She wasn’t even a quarter of the way up the black stone face of the hillside, but she could see out over the streets of Newmarket and Seepwater to Longhill. In the morning light, the roofs looked like a city of gold. It was an illusion. It was all stone and wood, brick and tile. It was only distance that made it beautiful.
And below her, on the southernmost of the four bridges that touched Oldgate—the one that spanned the northernmost edge of the Silt and reached across to Seepwater—she saw Sammish making her way toward her. Alys watched the little figure, small as a doll with distance, and felt a complexity of anticipation and dread, gratitude and resentment and growing restlessness. It was good having the girl as her accomplice in finding out what had happened, her eyes and ears where Alys was too wary to go herself. It gave her a path forward that she hadn’t had before. Already, they’d found that no one seemed to have a price on Alys. The taprooms of Longhill weren’t asking what had become of her except in the most idle, perfunctory ways. Nor had anyone come to her mother to dig for information about what Darro had been about when he’d died. All of it important for her to know, all of it calming in its fashion.
She should have been pleased, and in part she was. But Sammish wasn’t Darro, and some part of Alys’s heart felt betrayed by everyone who wasn’t. Everyone in the city. The world.
Sammish reached the near end of the bridge and began the long trudge up the face of Oldgate, coming in and out of sight as the switchback carried her, and growing taller and less doll-like every time. Alys felt a vague obligation to go down and meet her, and resented it until it was too late and Sammish reached her. Then she felt a pang of guilt and resented that instead.
Sammish squatted beside her. The sun was fully risen now, the roofs to the east had lost their gold, and the river hadn’t yet caught the brightness that it later would. A cart passed behind them, with the mule tied at the back as a brake against gravity pulling it down. The other girl pulled a tart from her sleeve and held it out to Alys almost tentatively. The crust was gold, and the center black with berries. Alys took it with a nod of thanks and bit into the warm, crisp salt-and-sweet. She hadn’t realized until just then that she was hungry.
Sammish had a tart of her own, and they ate in silence for a moment before Sammish spoke. “I found the bluecloak.”
Alys shifted to look at her directly. Pleasure danced at the corners of Sammish’s mud-brown eyes. “At least I think I did. You said he called himself Tannen something?”
“The one Orrel took the belt from?”
“I think so,” Sammish said. “I’m not certain. You saw him better than I did, and the one I found isn’t city guard. But his name’s Tannen, and he’s the right age and frame. I think it’s him.”
“Where?”
“Camnit warehouse,” Sammish said, gesturing across the water. “Do you know the one with blue doors next to the ropemakers’ guild hall? There. He’s new to the work. If that’s because he lost his place in the guard…”
Alys put the last of her pastry into her mouth, leaning forward as if by mere will she could see across the water and make out one door from another. The thing in her head was moving now. She couldn’t put a name to what she was feeling, but it was warm and high in her chest. And it didn’t hurt. It was strange to feel something that didn’t hurt. It left her lightheaded.
“Let’s go see,” she said. She rose and started down the slope to the river and the bridges. Sammish trotted after her.
At the bridge, the city guard eyed them suspiciously—two Inlisc girls on the wrong side of the water—then waved them past and went on collecting bronze tolls from the carters and laborers carrying cloth and wood and sacks of wheat to the eastern bank. Near the halfway point in the span, a street cleaner’s cart was parked. Four young men—prisoners of the city—stood in it shirtless, throwing shovelfuls of shit and dead animals into the water. They whistled at Alys and Sammish, and one dropped his trousers to wag an unimpressive penis at them both until the bluecloak shouted at him and flicked his bare ass with a mule goad. Alys noticed them the way she did the sun or the sound of the river.
Once they reached the docks at Riverport, the activity stopped seeming like an anthill and grew into something more like a storm. Harvest hadn’t come, but the preparations for it were stirring the streets. Boats unloaded barrels of sugar from island cities like Imaja and Caram far to the south. As soon as the holds were emptied, sacks of wheat and rye took their place until the waterline rose back up their sides. Fortunes were being made and lost in the chaos. A broken crane that slowed one family’s pier might mean their ruin. A wise purchase of vinegar could let another family keep pickled eggs and vegetables through a bad spring when a mouthful of food was worth more than its weight in silver or silk. Mules dropped their heads and pushed through the crowded streets. Carters whipped away dogs and beggars. The warehouses stood with their doors open, and enforcers with chains and lead-dipped ropes guarded the goods. The air was thick with the smells of sweat and spice and the river.
It would have been a fine place for a pull, except that no one here carried a fat wallet. The rich merchants and skilled artisans were all in their courtyards and houses, playing at contracts and law. The silver and bronze remnants of Alys’s one broken gold coin were probably the most wealth in the street. At the end of the second dock from the bridge, Sammish touched her arm. Alys let herself be led away from the river and toward the warehouses.
The Camnit family was well enough known that Alys had heard of it. They were Hansch merchants with family ties outside of Kithamar, but roots in the city that went back generations. They weren’t nobility. Noble blood didn’t live east of the water. They were wealth, though, and had the power that came with gold. Their warehouse was large, well maintained, and close to the water. Sammish put her head down as they walked past tall, wide doors painted the blue of a midsummer sky. Alys felt the urge to stare into the warehouse, searching through the shadows for a familiar face. Darro’s voice came back to her. Fifty steps. She put her eyes to the street and counted fifty like it was a kind of magic. When they reached an intersection with smaller, less dignified warehouses and guild halls, she looked back.
A cart was coming up from the river, moving toward the Camnit doors. Two thick-shouldered men drove a pair of mules. The cart was piled precariously high with barrels of salt.
“The one at the back,” Sammish said.
Following the cart, a younger man walked, his shirt off. He looked fresh, pale, and doughy compared to the older carters, and he used a long pole to steady the load. Each of those barrels was worth more than his season’s pay. If one fell and broke while he was on the stick, he’d be working for less than free.
